Speed, simplicity and self-confidence are important elements in becoming and maintaining a competitive business. As competitiveness in a marketplace increases, quickly responding to specific demands within the market becomes increasingly important. If one competitor fails to quickly respond to a consumer's demand, then the consumer's demand may substantially decrease, at least with regard to products of the one competitor. The consumer may use a suitable substitute product from another competitor. Consumer demands are important not only upon initial product selection, but with continued product maintenance and upgrades over the life of a product.
Many factors contribute to slowing the process of bringing a product to market, thereby weakening the competitiveness of a business. Complexity of a product contributes to the difficulties in meeting specific consumer design demands in a timely manner. The complexity of world-wide production, the changing nature of competition, and even the complexity internal to production companies, generally slow the process of bringing a new or even modified product to market.
In order to coordinate and expedite product creation and management, product or materials management software applications have been created. For example, product lifecycle management (PLM) software applications have been developed as an information technology (IT) resource to provide a global environment for developing, describing, managing and communicating digital product knowledge and related information. Some PLM systems enable a company to design and render products virtually, thus avoiding the need to build prototypes. Such systems can save money, parts and other resources as well improve product and workplace safety and ergonomics.
Specific product information rendered by manufacturers has conventionally been coordinated by employing so-called “Bills of Materials” (BOMs). The term “bill-of-materials,” as conventionally understood in the art, refers to an explosion listing of physical parts. Specifically, a product may have many subassemblies, some or all of which may have further subassemblies. A bill-of-materials is a printed-out parts list having indentations where the indentations correspond to a depth of hierarchy of each product in each subassembly. The bill-of-materials traditionally has been utilized during the manufacturing process of an assembly to provide a reference for the relationship of each physical component to other physical components in the assembly.
In conventional BOM systems, management of BOMs can be complicated by the needs of different contributors and consumers of the BOM information. A BOM typically originates in Engineering and provides a list of parts necessary to define a product. The structure of an “Engineering Bill of Material” is determined by a breakdown of systems or logical groupings of parts. In order for a BOM to be used for the purposes of downstream organizations involved in the procurement or assembly of the products, changes need to be made to the structure of the BOM to accommodate these purposes. These changes result in multiple BOM structures. Maintaining separate BOM structures with a manual translation is error prone, and does not facilitate an efficient change management process. The issue of having multiple BOM structures is further compounded when a BOM is used by service personnel to track the components of a physical instance of a product. One approach for addressing the error-prone BOM management process is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication Number 2013/0006408, which is herein incorporated by reference.
In many instances, it is advantageous to model the BOMs in a three-dimensional (3D) CAD assembly. Two-dimensional (2D) assembly drawings can then be created from the 3D assembly for the manufacturing of a product. For many products, however, 2D assembly drawings may include hundreds of drawings illustrating only static views, which do not necessarily reflect the build process of the site-specific product. In addition, valuable information can be lost when converting from the 3D model to the 2D assembly drawings. Further, conventional 3D CAD assemblies can be difficult to maintain because of the unpredictable permutation of the BOM throughout the lifecycle of a product caused by change management. To model every possible permutation of a BOM in a 3D CAD model, as well as providing manufacturing site-specific views of the 3D model, can be impossible to accomplish with reasonable effort.
Thus, a need exists for improved systems and methods for generating 3D assemblies from digitized data in a PLM system based on user input.